The How Not to Cookbook: Lessons Learned the Hard Way

Learn what not to do in the kitchen from this hilarious collection of real advice by real people. Sometimes the best way to learn is to make mistakes. That’s the premise of this book—a sort of anti-cookbook. Fed up with our prevailing food culture of patronizing celebrity chefs with their rigid and often impossible instructions, Aleksandra Mir started a website to invite real people to send in their kitchen disaster stories, so that the rest of us could benefit from their experience. The result was a viral Internet phenomenon. Home cooks from around the world streamed in with advice. One thousand of their tips were then collected in this humorous and ultimately heartening and cathartic book. The packaging is as funny as the content too; it tricks you into thinking you’ve come across a vintage workhorse cookbook that’s seen its share of abuse. Don’t look here for recipes to be followed slavishly. Instead, this is a book to dip in and out of, choosing from among the wide variety of little gems that are always idiosyncratic, often opinionated, and never boring. Many will spark debate. Some may not be so practical but are wickedly funny. But the best part of the book is its reassurance that it’s okay to be human, to make mistakes.

Aleksandra Mir is an artist whose work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, ICA Philadelphia, SFMOMA, and the Whitney Museum, New York.